New Headquarters for the North-Holland Provincial Council

We have a huge park, a horizontal ground line.  On it, an old building, the current headquarters of the North-Holland Provincial Council, to which our project must add a great many new services. The old building halts, curbs the park like a wall that, propped on the ground, divides and fragments the location.

We don’t go along with its dynamic; instead we seek to liberate and lend continuity to the ground so that it expands freely in all directions and nature flows organically. To do this, our project proposes two opposed and complementary interventions: to bury much of the program (parking area, services and the council chambers). With more than a meter of earth on top of it, the roof will enable new trees to be planted and will float above the terrain, with the new office areas created as spaces around the trees. In this way the earth, the garden, will flow ever onwards and will relate to the building complex with great naturalness and autonomy.

The old building consists of a group of juxtaposed bodies, in which the protruding parts dialogue structurally with it.

Josep Lluís Mateo

Typology: Public building
Restricted competition.First Prize
Surface: 13,500 m2
Project: 2001
Location: Haarlem, The Netherlands